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The online death: How do people deal.
AlphaTwo
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
This topic might have actually been inspired by the recent posts that has been made, but I'm not here to talk about the validity of that post, rather, the real situation of death, and the virtual life that ends with it.
Back in the old days before the internet, when someone dies, you get your obituary, your boss/coworkers/family/friends hears about it, and everything is done. The bank would probably hear about it and not add to your Visa bills, the government would probably know it too and stop asking for taxes and stuff.
But with our ever expanding presense online in this "virtual life", what should happen when one does expire? You've probably seen the odd examples of when people's parents/siblings post on an account saying "such and such" died, but those are the nice cases when the community knows. What if the community doesn't get notified? You ever wonder if a certain former stop posting because he just lost interest, or did they just expire.
With the popular growth of MySpace/Facebook networking sites, the Wikipedia collabration, and countless forums where people connect and interact, should we be able to shake off someone's death even if we didn't know them?
Back in the old days before the internet, when someone dies, you get your obituary, your boss/coworkers/family/friends hears about it, and everything is done. The bank would probably hear about it and not add to your Visa bills, the government would probably know it too and stop asking for taxes and stuff.
But with our ever expanding presense online in this "virtual life", what should happen when one does expire? You've probably seen the odd examples of when people's parents/siblings post on an account saying "such and such" died, but those are the nice cases when the community knows. What if the community doesn't get notified? You ever wonder if a certain former stop posting because he just lost interest, or did they just expire.
With the popular growth of MySpace/Facebook networking sites, the Wikipedia collabration, and countless forums where people connect and interact, should we be able to shake off someone's death even if we didn't know them?
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I mean, forgive me for this, but I don't know you at all personally. If you passed away and someone here mentioned it to me, I'd say "shucks" and move on with no emotion. I'd expect the same reaction if I passed away and someone here found out. (Actually, I'd expect a few cheers at the news, but that's another story.)
Being "online" doesn't change anything. If you are familiar with someone in any way and they pass on, then you might feel something, whether your relationship was entirely "virtual" or internet-based or not. I've had old EQ acquaintances pass away - Saban can attest to that if he clicks into this thread - and I felt sad. And there have been people that passed away that I honestly didn't know and didn't care about, and I shrugged the news off.
I'm not sure this topic is valid for G&T, though.
I guess it depends on how well you know the people on the forums. Lots of people come and go. Maybe some of them died, maybe they just got bored posting here. If you don't know someone well enough to know if they died or not, you probably don't need to know, right?
Maybe there's room in the market for a virtual dead-man's switch - a website that you have to log into every 24 hours otherwise it logs into all your forum and social network accounts and posts a pre-composed message informing all your friends that you've passed on.
Contact: 3737-4467-9408
Guy1: There's nothing bitchin about the games soundtrack. It's practically all elevator music.
Guy2: That's just hilariously stupid. I can't imagine playing a fighting game with "Girl from Ipanema" playing in the background.
Fantastic.
Anyway, I think it all depends on the person. Some people are going to endear themselves to an online community because they invest the time and effort to do so. Someone who makes themselves a presence on a board or in a group like an MMO guild will be missed more than others.
It also depends on the person hearing the news. Some people just invest more emotion in their online connections, either because they don't have many significant connections in the real world, or because they just feel more comfortable among their internet counterparts.
sketchyblargh / Steam! / Tumblr Prime
I think it's working!
http://www.penny-arcade.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=25410492&highlight=#25410492
Worth a read.
Here's an example that's struck a chord with me: I was at work on day when suddenly an e-mail came up about someone in some department in the company died. I've never even heard of such person, yet I'm compelled to feel something now that I've heard about it, no?
Taking the electronic medium out, and there would have been no way I would have heard about it, and I have to wonder whether online communities have similar liabilities.
Well this is actually really interesting for another reason. Who actually owns the rights to use an online account? If I die, does my girlfriend inherit my screenname? Or is the account technically owned by the forum administrators? (legally, if they have the ability to kick you, then it's likely the forum admins)
This has been really important in various cases where MySpace is hesitant to relinquish an account after someone dies (because, well, they can't be sure that the person who the account belongs to is actually dead and that the notification of death isn't a prank).
Even in the days before e-mail, these things were announced in company-wide announcements in most places. Either you would've received a memo or there would've been an announcement on a PA system. Administratively it's important to do so so that work doesn't start piling up at his desk posthumously.
(obviously they do it for more than the pragmatic reason, as if it's over a PA system it's usually accompanied by a moment of silence ... it's a showing of, if not friendship, then at least professional respect)
THANK
YOU.
sketchyblargh / Steam! / Tumblr Prime
It's, however, sometimes hard without the corporeal element to really "feel" for someone that's identified by their Alf avatar and Fruit Fucker signature, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.
I don't know, I guess I can't personally say that I feel like I'm for-reals friends with anyone here like I would be with a person in the really real world. So if any of you died I don't know that I would be sad, per se... I'd probably think that it sucks and wish the best for your families and whatnot, but I don't think I'd get all worked up about it.
I mean, realistically any of you guys could stop posting any day for any reason...and I think we all realize that. I mean, there is no real commitment to this internets relationship we all have here.
A thread from SE++ about how bad D&D'ers are? No sir... I wouldn't touch that with a 10 foot pole.
But therein lies the difference. In one case, a family decides to create a "shrine" of sorts. Another family may choose to leave the deceased member's blog up for posterity as a sort of shrine. Another family may choose to have that blog taken down (for instance: if that blog contained a suicide note from the deceased -- which has happened once or twice).
Since an online account can be revoked, can it be considered property? If so, who should inherit it, and what standards must a company follow in ensuring that any announcement of death is genuine? There's a very fine line between "making sure we don't act hastily" and "aggrivating a grieving family's sorrow."
If the account isn't considered property, then what procedures should a company follow if a user does die? Because people deal with death in their own ways, it can be seen as "incorrect" whether they choose to keep or remove the account. Removing the account without notice would inconvenience other members for sure ... but does the company have the right to announce the death of a user? Would it be in good taste?
Right now, there are no definitive answers to any of these questions, and as web services become more and more subscription/account based, people are starting to worry about the eventual problems this will cause.
No, I know they can. I think I may have misunderstood what the OP meant by "should be able to shrug it off." I mean, you can shrug off anyone's death. It depends on your personality, your philosophy toward death, and how well you knew them. People die all the time. People have died in the time it took me to post this. But I don't know them, and if I'm being honest, I don't care about them or their deaths.
Or rather the idea behind monkeysphere.
Maybe you guys dont even know what a monkeysphere is, that's pretty ignorant of me huh?
Then the guy shows up a week later and yells 'Surprise!' He said he'd staged it to give the forum a sense of community.
We all came together a second time to tear the guy and his accomplice to shreds.
There are a certain number of people that you can maintain a relationship with. (Dunbar's number) Studies suggest that for human beings it is perhaps around 100 to 150. Im talking friends here, or people who are emotionally part of your life.
If one of those people dies, you feel emotion. If a bus full of nuns flies off a cliff and lands in an orphanage that explodes in a firey ball of death. You're all "meh"
Its fact.
And i think it is entirely possible to let someone from the internet into your "sphere" i've done it infact. And if any of my internet friends dies. I'll be pretty cut up about it.
I don't think the internet and real life are much diffrent in this respect, save for the fact that letting people into your "sphere" is perhaps more difficult to achive?
Especially given that once a person hears about the death, how they died will influence how they react to the death. No sane person is going to say "too bad, I don't care" if they hear that a 12 year-old girl they've never met got raped to death just because they're "outside their monkeysphere". If the same girl died of cancer or something nearly entirely outside our control as a species, that's one thing, but if the death was clearly unnecessary and caused by someone else we don't know treating the victim as something less than human, we're still pissed. That still doesn't mean we shouldn't continue moving forward in our own lives, though.
Putting myself in danger of looking like an arsehole here, but.
If a 12 year old girl gets raped to death, i just can't be really upset about it. I can't. It certainly disgusts me. And i think the overriding emotion there is concern about the fact that someone living in my society, sharing the same oxygen as me, has the fucking ability to rape a 12 year old girl to death. Makes me sad that mankind actually stoops to those levels.
but mourning her death? I am sorry but no. I will show respect when talking about it, or anything like that, or if someone i know *is* upset by it i will be respectful and caring etc. But i cannot feel personally upset or feel like i have to mourn the death myself.
Because she was outside my circle.
mourning is one extreme, being upset is something moderate in hte middle
and i think empathy is something you can chose to develop /turn on in your life anyways
nowadays reading stories like that in the paper or seeing them on oprah/whatnot can be really sad... i dont have a cry for them or something but damn i guess i just empathize a lot
Read a little further down.
Anyway, just taking a guess. I'd say I wouldn't feel as bad as I would if someone I've known very well for years and years had died, because I never REALLY got to know you, as has been mentioned earlier. But the loss would still be felt, for sure. When you have a bunch of friends, and you lose one of your friends, you definitely feel bad about it because of everything you won't have together again. In a forum community, we're a bunch of personalities, which is just a part of a friendship. So if one of you dies, we'd miss your personality. We wouldn't be able to miss you for all the times we went out to an amusement park all day or getting drunk and picking up girls or whatever because we've likely never done that with each other.
I hope that makes sense.
Edit: Without looking back, has someone mentioned the time someone heavy into an MMO died and his MMO friends held a funeral/memorial for the player?
And didn't they get attacked during it?
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You find people coping with it in different manners. In the first case, the admin was in close touch with another member of the site (read: they probably would have ended up getting married) when he got into a car accident....on the way home from visiting her, if memory serves. Suffice to say, it was a huge loss, especially as it was the first time that we'd suffered something like this. I must admit that I didn't know him well personally and I felt the impact more in a functional manner where the site was concerned, but I did know a number of people who knew him well, and they took it hard. A number of people did make it out to the funeral, which we were all invited to by his family as they knew how much the site had meant to him, but in the end, it's not unlike many other deaths IRL. The site had a black banner for a bit, some people still "remember" him in their signatures or other ways around the site, and you always wish that it hadn't happen, but just like real life - people eventually seem to move on.
The second one was a person who wasn't as well known, and as mentioned, most people simply thing "well, that's a shame" and move on. The siteowner put up the black bar again, and that was that.
The third one was probably the hardest for me, as I knew him well, and he was very close in age to me - a year or two younger. He had cancer, and spent a lot of time at the site because he was unable to go out and interact with the rest of the world in normal means. He was always a valued member of the site, and a great guy, and you could feel the impact when he told us that he had cancer. In the end, he had a choice between "fight, go through excruciating pain, and have a chance of surviving to move on, or take this medication and not suffer for two years or so, but you will most certainly die." He chose to fight, and his mother registered at the site and kept us informed of the progress, since she knew how through the site it let him feel "normal," and some people had even previously come to visit him and the entire family found them to be quality people. She was the one who let us know when he finally passed away. I got drunk that night. I wasn't able to make it to the funeral, and in a way that makes it feel a little worse - when you can't be there.
Anyway, not sure where I'm going with this. The OP seemed to wonder what it was like, and I have personal experience there. All I can offer is that it's not unlike RL deaths, except that in some ways it's easier and in others harder.
Yes. It was WoW. They made a video of the attack, no less.
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I don't think this is the case atall.
I dont want people outside my sphere getting raped or murderd. Because they're human just like me. If they're human, and they're getting raped and killed, that means there's a chance i could be raped and killed, or anyone else who is inside my sphere. And i think that's where the "pissed"ness comes from.
Because that shit should not be happening in a society that you have to live in.
by the way i dont live my life with this monkeysphere shit running around my head all the time, i dont take is as gospel, i just like the concept and think that it has alot of relevance.
I've considered the notification of online aquaintences in the event of my death, but have done nothing towards that event.